Writing now, I shudder to think of Watson, or of Wade, or their forebears, behind my shoulder. The history of science has revealed, again and again, the danger of trusting one’s instincts or of being led astray by one’s biases—of being too convinced that one knows the truth. From the errors of thinking that the sun revolves around the earth, that the human lineage separated from the great ape lineage tens of millions of years ago, and that the present-day human population structure is fifty thousand years old whereas in fact we know that it was forged through population mixtures largely over
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